New Formation Flying Testbed for Analyzing Distributed Estimation and Control Architectures

Formation °ying spacecraft has been identied as an enabling technology for many future NASA and DoD space missions. However, this is still, as yet, an unproven technology. Thus, to minimize the risk associated with using this new technology on future missions, testbeds are required that enable a com- prehensive simulation and validation. This paper presents an innovative hardware-in-the-loop testbed that can be used to analyze estimation and control architectures for formation °ying spacecraft. The testbed consists of multiple computers that each em- ulate a spacecraft in the °eet. These computers are restricted to communicate via serial cables to emu- late the actual inter-spacecraft communications ex- pected on-orbit. All estimation and control algo- rithms are implemented in MATLAB, which greatly enhances its °exibility/recongurability and provides an excellent environment for rapidly comparing nu- merous control and estimation algorithms and ar- chitectures. A multi-tasking/multi-thread software environment is simulated by simultaneously running several instances of MATLAB on each computer. The paper presents the initial simulation results us- ing a highly distributed estimation, coordination, and control architecture for a °eet of 4 spacecraft.